HBM2

AMD was the first to market with a consumer graphics card using HBM1 technology, but it was mainly an experiment for things to come. The Radeon R9 Fury X and its siblings in the R9 Fury and R9 Nano were good cards, held back by the 28nm process and the first revision of HBM1 tech.

HBM1 is limited to 4GB total, but HBM2 will allow for multiple stacks - leading up to 16GB, or more. We should expect Radeon RX Vega graphics cards with over 16GB of HBM2 in the professional markets, but 4-8GB cards will be destined for us consumers - and I'll explain why that's not a bad thing.

HBCC

HBM2 and HBCC are going to get confused in the very near future, I can see it now - but they're different technologies that will work hand-in-hand. HBM2 is the memory technology that will be used on Radeon RX Vega, offering some great bandwidth numbers of up to 512GB/sec - but it'll be the memory footprint that makes the difference. We will see higher minimum FPS results from the HBCC, something that could let AMD push out Radeon RX Vega with just 4GB of HBM2 and really compete with 8-11GB of GDDR5X on the GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti from NVIDIA.

Just like the Fiji-powered Radeon R9 Fury X, we will see smaller graphics cards thanks to the smaller footprint of HBM2 that sits on the interposer with the Vega NCU. High Bandwidth Cache Controller, or HBCC, is the big deal here - something AMD will surely rub in NVIDIA's face in the coming weeks and months leading into, and after the release of Vega.

AMD's exciting new High Bandwidth Cache Controller will be one of the shining stars of Radeon RX Vega, as it acts like a smart controller for your framebuffer. We should see AMD keeping up with the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and its 11GB of GDDR5X, while only packing 8GB of VRAM - thanks to HBC, and its memory management.

AMD showed this off at their recent Capsaicin and Cream event at GDC 17 earlier this year, with Deus Ex: Mankind Divided seeing a massive 50%+ increase in average FPS, and over 100% increase in minimum FPS. Some truly amazing results, but as always - I need to wait until the card is in my hands with my personal testing before I pass judgment.

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